Friday, August 03, 2007

finding a new home

After a whirlwind weekend of meetings and greetings, and after having been poked, prodded, questioned and evaluated, and after speaking and receiving the Sunday vote...next came the challenge of finding a home for our family. We had one day to accomplish the task!

So the entire day Monday was spent with a wonderful and patient real estate agent who led us from house to house. After about house #6 we were starting to get quite discouraged. The price tag of homes compared to Lansing was staggering. People think of the south as being an affordable place to get lots of house for the dollar. Not so in Tuscaloosa. Especially not in the area surrounding the church.

We spent a few weeks beforehand researching real estate online, so we had a really good idea of what to expect. And we had the houses ranked in order of priority. But there are a lot things that you can't learn from a computer listing until you see the house in person.

Some of our top choices ended up being knocked out of the running because of floor-plans and indadequate features for hosting guests in our home. There was, however, one house that Tracy had been really excited about from the information we read online. It was at the very top of our price range, but it seemed to be a fantastic value for its neighborhood and Tracy kind of had a feeling about it from the very beginning (maybe there's something to this whole "women's intuition" thing, but I would prefer to call it "the Spirit's leading").

This particular house was just about the last house on our schedule for the day. We were kind of feeling the pressure, because if this last house was no good...we'd be in a pickle. We walked through the door and took a big sigh of relief. It was the only (absolutely the ONLY) house we found that didn't need lots of work and was pretty much ready to move in. The floor plan worked well. They yard was great. It felt like home.

That had been our main prayer before the search began. Tracy and I prayed together that there would be just one house that day that felt like home. And that is exactly what happened.